Product Description

What if you had the power to change the future, by reliving the past? Eliza Dushko and Jason Priestly star in Tru Calling, a sexy, fast-paced show with dramatic ticking clock suspense that puts a stylish new spin on crime thrillers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18812 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-11-30
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: Box set, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Dubbed in: English
• Number of discs: 6
• Running time: 880 minutes

Amazon.com
Tru Calling's trump cards are its intriguing paranormal premise and the lead performance by the underrated Eliza Dushku (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), both of which have earned it a small but loyal audience; both of these virtues are preserved in this six-disc set that includes not only the entire 2003 debut season but a surprising amount of supplemental features. Dushku plays Tru Davies, a young morgue attendant who discovers, much to her dismay, that she can hear the voices of the dead, as well as reverse their fates; with the help of her brother (Shawn Reaves) and boss (Zack Galifianakis), Tru relives the last day of these people's lives in order to prevent their untimely deaths.

Episodic highlights include "Valentine," which pits Tru against a serial killer; "Closure," in which a young war hero attempts to reunite with his girlfriend after his death; "Murder in the Morgue," which revolves around the killing of a bride on her wedding day; and "Daddy's Girl," which reveals some disturbing news regarding Tru's past and introduces Jason Priestley as the sinister-seeming Jack Harper, a man with powers similar to hers, but with very different intentions regarding the recently deceased. The six-disc set includes all 20 episodes of the first season (including the two-part finale), several featuring commentary by Dushku, Reaves, and the producers; deleted scenes, audition reels for several cast members, and a music video for Full Blown Rose's theme song, "Can Somebody Help Me," round out the extras. --Paul Gaita

Customer Reviews

tru calling 2ed. seson
arrived in great conduction, have not started watching it yet, sure it will also be great thanks.

Tru Calling:
I really did like this show, along with a few other supernatural shows. It's too bad that the show ended so Early. Either way.. I did purchage Season 1 and 2... And watched every second of it.. as quickly as I posibly can, with Rene`. Anyone know if the guy who played the villian was her brother? ( my mother seems to think he was her brother )

Very surprisingly a pretty decent show
I resisted watching TRU CALLING when it first came out, largely because of bitterness over what turned out to be unsubstantiated rumors that Eliza Dushku had chosen to star in this show rather than a Faith spin off from BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. I relented a little bit a year or so again when I read an interview with Joss Whedon in which he asserted that there had never been a Faith series. Oh, yeah, there had been some talk about possibly developing such a series, and at the end of Season One of TRU CALLING, there was renewed discussion when it seemed inevitable that the show would be cancelled. But in fact there never was a concrete proposal for a Faith series. Whedon never pitched a network, never wrote a proposal, never wrote a script, never wrote an outline of a Faith series. On the other hand, Eliza Dushku was offered the lead role in an actual pitched and accepted series.

Now I have seen TRU CALLING and I have to report that except for one spectacularly cringe-inducing aspect of the show, I actually really enjoyed it. The "cringe" came each week when that week's corpse asked for Tru's help. I'm not sure that anything in any major series of the past ten years caused me such pain as that one utterly horrid moment. You knew each week that at some point a corpse would suddenly animate, turn its head, and ask for Tru's help. I can't think of any good alternative to this, but I'm not hired as a script writer in Hollywood. Surely a first-rate writer could have thought of an alternative of the corpse-turning-its-head-of-the-week horror. It is impossible to imagine that Joss Whedon would have allowed such a travesty to take place each week. Luckily, Joss Whedon is the brains behind Eliza Dushku's next series, DOLLHOUSE, which will start in the fall of 2008 on FOX.

Apart from that one appalling moment each week, TRU CALLING was actually a pretty decent show. It had one of the marks of a good show: it got better and better as it went along. Each episode followed a formulaic structure, but all concerned with the project tried to make it surpass those limitations. Much of this was in the gradual development of a long story arc, something that unfortunately got nipped in the bud with the cancellation of the series early in Season Two. But even with the ending of the show, there was a sense that there was not an endless repetition of the same episode, but a progressive story. This came in stages: Davis's revelation that he knew about Tru's gift; her learning that she possessed the same gift that her mother had; the introduction of Jack (Jason Priestly) as Tru's nemesis; and the discovery that her father backed Jack and previously played the same role as Jack in oppostion to Tru's mother (btw, fans of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA should note that in the episode where we see Tru's mother in flashback, the role of Tru's mother was played by the same actress who plays Seelix in BSG). The show was revealing symptoms of becoming a far more interesting show when it was cancelled. From a business standpoint it is hard to fault the cancellation of the show; the ratings were extraordinarily awful. From an aesthetic point of view, it is regretable.

One thing is made clear on the show (and should encourage anyone looking forward to DOLLHOUSE this fall): Eliza Dushku can carry a show. She was far and away the best thing in the series and every moment that she spends onscreen is a delight. On BUFFY she made a habit of stealing scenes or at least providing unforgetable moments in conjunction with other actors (especially vampires; her scenes with David Boreanaz as Angel on the eponymous series or her scenes with James Marsters as Spike on BUFFY were unforgetable). But she had never been asked to carry a show. Here she did and did so brilliantly. Whatever faults the show had -- and it had several -- they were not Eliza Dushku's.

I did have some problems with the casting of the secondary characters. Zach Galifianakis was excellent as Davis, her mentor/sidekick in the morgue, but this was offset by the unceasingly annoying Shawn Reaves as Tru's brother Harrison. He was so persistently stupid from one episode to another that you wonder why Tru didn't just slap him and yell at him to stop being such a perpetual idiot. The third sibling was Meredith, played by the almost impossibly gorgeous Jessica Collins. On a countless number of shows an initial line up of characters are imagined, but as the shows go along some fail to find much of a role. I loved the lovely Ms. Collins, but the writers never found much to do with her character. I never came to enjoy Jason Priestly much in his role as Tru's nemesis. Perhaps old 90210 fans felt differently. But overall, apart from Davis and Matthew Bomer's Luc, I never felt like many of the supporting characters added much to the show. This is more the fault of the writers than the actors.

All in all, I was delightfully surprised at TRU CALLING. It started off slowly, but by the end it was a surprisingly decent series. Unfortunately by then no one was watching it. But it is definitely a show worth watching. And if you are a fan of Eliza Dushku it is a must-see. She was at every moment the best thing the series had to offer.